


the lucky ones

by stellamayfairs



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 03:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16297412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellamayfairs/pseuds/stellamayfairs
Summary: a character study in the two teryns’ daughters. originally written for ladiesofthedas week.





	the lucky ones

Haunting. That is the word that comes to Anora’s mind when she holds up her looking glass.Haunted by the ghost of a girl with romantic notions and flower crowns, destined for the most imprisoning glory a woman could bear.

That girl had tangled braids and bruised cheeks and bloody knees. That girl shot arrows with the accuracy of her father’s best men. That girl was destined for the world and knew it was hers; it was a fact simply accepted.

And here she sits, the woman that girl was fated to be, unbroken but deeply changed.

Here she sits, alone.

Anora now wears her hair coifed, much the way Eleanor Cousland does; Eleanor Cousland’s own daughter wears her hair past her waist, undone and past her ass. Occasionally she sits on it simply to prove that she can, an immensely impractical and Orlesian thing to do. This is natural, of course; she is destined for Orlais and everyone knows it, knows she will live out her days dressed fabulously, eating cake for breakfast, and yet spitting the irreverence that only a Fereldan would.

Ferelden is still her bestial nature after all, and she has no particular desire to conquer it.

This is why Anora never fears her. Why she is not a lady of her court. They say it’s because of the whispers, that the Cousland girl is Cailan’s favorite, but it isn’t. Not one bit. Or so Anora tells herself.

“Are you worried?”

She flexes her long hands at the sound of the question, shifting the priority of thoughts on her mind. She can not remember the last time she had only one line of thought. She can’t possibly, for the reality was that she was not a woman, she was what stood between a nation and collapse.

“Not one bit,” she lies.

The fib is innocent enough, the only kind she ever tells Erlina.

Erlina does not need this burden, does not need to know that dread snakes down her spine with the passing of the hours, days, quite possibly weeks before she receives word from Ostagar.

And so she lies to her one confidant. Her one friend.

And so she is alone.

She had other friends, once. In another time. Another life.

One friend, in particular, now skulks through these halls like a thief in the night, and this is what she is, slipping into Anora’s husband’s bed chamber, a ritual that Anora has long grown numb to, though Erlina, Maker bless her, has not.

It hasn’t always been like this.

Sile gave her implicit approval at Anora’s lady in waiting in that other life, though she utterly shirked the idea of having one herself, still does. Sile is, of course, not a queen, and has never once even pretended to have envied Anora the station. It is never a wonder; Sile has everything she wants without a crown to bore her, with the status to command attention whenever she desires it and the anonymity to make herself invisible enough to do her own bidding.

Anora never envies her this. Anora has never envied her anything, not even the attentions of her husband, and envies not her husband the attentions of Sile; the moment she gives herself over to envy, to the pointless musings of the life she might have had if it had not been decided before she was born, she will be lost.

This is the difference between Sile and Anora.

Sile was a Fereldan woman, as she Anora been. Sile is the daughter of a teryn, as Anora once was.

Not anymore.

Anora is no Fereldan woman. She is no man’s daughter.

Because Anora Mac Tir is Ferelden herself.

She has given the notion up long ago, to be a queen and a woman both.

To have it all.

The woman still lurks in her blood, the woman she might have been, the woman she once was, forgoing the corsets and the crown and the stifling passageways with their stifling people and to run through the open air, to be drenched and freezing and happy and free.

Not like she was when she was a girl. Not like Sile.

Sile often wonders if Eleanor coveted Loghain his daughter. While both daughters can be none but their own fathers’, quite unmistakably, Anora has a natural propensity towards civility, propriety and eloquence, while Sile, who has been trained extensively and skillfully in these same virtues, detests propriety as Andrastians detest heathens.

The might be either unstoppable allies or ruthless opponents. Whichever they wish.

To destroy each other, or to fortify.

The common folk of Ferelden, the heart of Ferelden, the lifeblood of Ferelden, loves them both with a vicious reverence, surpassing Cailan to cry out for adoration of Anora as they surpass Fergus as the heir of Highever to cry out the name of Sile. In noble circles it is different; Anora criticized for her common blood, rumored in some circles to be the cause of her apparent infertility; it had been reckless of Maric to promise his heir to the daughter of a common soldier, they say, as heroic and revered as that soldier might have been; Sile, for her part, is entirely too unpatriotic with her extravagant gowns and her long enviable hair, is deemed the Great Whore of Ferelden for her less noble exploits.

In the end, they are perhaps correct about Maric’s haste to promise his son to the daughter of a teryn.

He most likely should have willed her the crown and nothing else.

The gift had, undoubtedly, been to elevate Loghain’s daughter to the highest form of nobility, as Cailan would inevitably be the future monarch; it might have been kinder to them both had he forgone the engagement and simply promised her the crown.

In that life, perhaps, he might have loved her better, as she loves him, even then, even now.

The position that Anora has meticulously groomed herself for had been equally inevitable for her Theirin blooded husband, but while she took it upon herself to make herself meticulously ready for her position, he assumes that the virtues of his station were inherted with the ease of his ascention to it, and when he discovers that this is not the case, seems disinclined to render the situation; he has a queen for that, after all, and she flawlessly directs his country, at least insofar as he can tell.

This leaves his time to other pursuits, and his favorite pursuit is Sile Cousland.

Does she regret the pain she knows this causes Anora, dear Nori, beautiful Anora, brilliant Anora?

Perhaps a bit. And still she does not falter. She, like the woman whose heart she betrays, will always due her duty.

Until one day she is asked to betray more than her queen’s heart.

Later she will tell herself that she was not to blame, that the Arl would always have killed her family, would have found any reason he might, true or not.

She will never fully believe this.

She knew the potential consequences when she did it, after all.

And yet, and yet, and yet –

She goes to Loghain with the correspondence from Orlais. Not Anora, no, she doesn’t wish to face her, not yet, not if she doesn’t need to, not when she stole the letters from bedchamber of the queen’s husband.

And so she tells Loghain everything.

She tells him every last piece of the plot to overthrow his daughter, to ally with Orlais, to destroy the far more pliable monarch that is his son in law in the chaos that ensues.

How is she to know Rendon’s spies would intercept her correspondence?

Later they’ll say she did it for Cailan, to protect him.

They’re wrong.

Her alliance is always, would always be, to Anora.

Even then. Even now.

The woman she sacrificed her own family for. The woman she would betray her lover for, one day, in a bloodied Landsmeet chamber, both of them knowing more of loss and the world than should have been their lot.

When Anora’s father tells her that Cailan is dead, she believes him.

When he tells her Sile perished with him, she does not, cannot, for reasons that she does not, cannot, explain even to herself.

She does not weep when they set flame to the empty vessel carrying what would have been her husband’s body out to sea, had they recovered his body at all. She does not weep as her beloved father’s sanity crumbles before her. She does not weep as her country is war torn, first by blighted fiends from below and then by civil war.

When rumors spread of the surviving warden, a woman with unruly dark hair and an insolent tongue, it is Sile she weeps for. When she infiltrates Howe’s estate, it is Sile she sends for.

It is Sile who flings her arms around her when they’re at last alone, alone, alone together for the first time since they were children, and it is Sile who weeps with her for Cailan, for the Couslands, for all they’ve lost, all they’ve said and all they haven’t.

It is Sile who weeps with her because they’re the only ones left.

It is Sile who is at her side at the Landsmeet, on the battlefield, at the council table every day thereafter.

“We’re stronger than they are,” Sile whispers to her in the chamber of Arl Howe’s Denerim estate, the night before their fates are to be decided.

Anora does not ask if she means the darkspawn or the nobles that will oppose them.

There is no need. It is simply a statement, all encompassing, entirely true.

Anora straightens herself before her reflection in the looking glass, and she smiles, because she is not alone, because she and Sile are the same, in the end.

They are women, and they are Ferelden, both.

They find each other, will always find each other, whatever the improbable circumstances that lead them.

What they have lost, what they still stand to lose, it no longer matters.

They have each other.

And so they have it all.


End file.
